


W is for Wormhole

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alphabet Soup Challenge, Episode: s03e18 Shades of Grey, Gen, Missing Scenes, episode-related, fixit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 18:37:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4447307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>Excerpt:</b> All of them were engineers and techs aside from Newman; not an anthropologist in the bunch: Harry's kids don't go in for all that touchy-feely "peaceful explorer" crap.  (It shouldn't feel so familiar, but it does.)<br/><a id="cutid1" name="cutid1"></a></p>
            </blockquote>





	W is for Wormhole

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Fignewton's Offworld Alphabet Soup Challenge: July 28, 2015
> 
> Takes place during "Shades of Grey"; references to "Touchstone".

Daniel would have called it "cognitive dissonance". The Red Queen would have said something like: "When I was younger, I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Is it Old Home Week if it was never home to begin with?

Harry's little offworld fief is on top of a butte. The place looks like Monument Valley crossed with Ancient Greece. He can't help but imagine Daniel's squalls about the miniature Rebel Alliance they've constructed in the middle of it: he suspects this "NID Offshoot" isn't really interested in responsible conservation of important archaeological sites.

He has to stop thinking about his team. He's got a new one now. Seven more or less ex-military _looters_ ; two women, five men. He tries not to think about the fact that up until a few years ago there wasn't much difference between the things he did and the things they're doing. He wonders how they rationalize being marooned out here (now that the Antarctic Gate is locked up tight). Maybe they figure Harry's going to ride to their rescue one of these days. Maybe they're willing to die for their country. (Maybe this black program is only the overture of a symphony that ends with the Stargate under the control of somebody else.)

Doesn't matter. Only it does, because he's their new boss. Three women, four men: Tobias, Kershaw, Slater, McGuire, Butterworth, Grieves, and Newman. All of them scruffy (McGuire has a beard) and none of them quite in uniform (he remembers being in-country for the Southeast Asia War Games; guys who'd been there more than a week modified their uniforms in a number of creative ways). The place is like an oven; he's sweltering in his leather jacket but he keeps it on for now: there are two ceramic knives hidden in the lining.

Newman makes the introductions, calling him "Colonel", introducing his people by rank. He's pushing for a military call-and-response O'Neill refuses to give him. (Always do the unexpected, one of his instructors told him once. It keeps the bad guys off balance.) Newman's a Major, Tobias is a Lieutenant, the other five are NCOs: A Chief, two SMSgts, a couple of TSgts. All of them engineers and techs aside from Newman; not an anthropologist in the bunch: Harry's kids don't go in for all that touchy-feely "peaceful explorer" crap. (It shouldn't feel so familiar, but it does.) These are just the smash-and-grab teams; there are about a dozen support personnel here too (cooks, bottlewashers, security, medical).

Newman shows him to his bunk so he can stow his gear. It's a reminder of how damned _trusting_ the SGC had been (that everyone was on the same page, that Area 51 was secure), because it has to have taken _months_ to bring through the gear to set this place up. (He wonders what they're doing about resupply--ammo, rations; things like that tend to run out. He wonders if this is the only Black Site out here, and if there's any way to find out.) After that, Newman is happy to give him the grand tour. His attitude is a mix of puppy-dog hero worship and uneven defiance: this has been his command for a while and O'Neill doubts Harry consulted him before putting it under new management.

Part of O'Neill admires the job they're doing here, and wants to make the operation sit up and sing. (Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.) Part of him is wondering how hard it will be to take down. (If someone gets spooked and puts a bullet in him, the question's moot, of course.) He wonders how long General Hammond will wait for him to come back before telling his team (his other team) the truth. After he has his little chat with Lt. Tobias (Newman handed him off and fled; O'Neill would like to know why but he can't be in two places at once), he wonders if General Hammond would _ever_ tell them the truth: Tobias says there's a mole on one of the Teams at the SGC. (They knew there had to be one somewhere, of course. But General Hammond had thought the mole had to be groundside support, if not someone further up the food chain.)

Of course, maybe there _is_ no Team mole: Tobias _also_ says Carter beat her out of a position at the SGC, which isn't plausible to anyone with any hands on information (they're always desperate for engineers and other wonks, and officer wonks are particularly scarce). He wonders who told it to her. Was this how Harry got her to sign on the dotted line? No way to tell. Maybe it means he can flip her. If he's here long enough. (If nobody shoots him.)

Then Newman comes bouncing back (O'Neill's duly grateful for the interruption; like every scientist ever, Tobias thinks everybody speaks fluent technobabble) to tell him Harry's on the phone for him. At least that settles the question of why Newman ditched him earlier: communication is a one-way street here. After all, it would be really inconvenient if Harry's luggage started talking at the wrong moment.

The call isn't just a demonstration that Harry gets the news from the SGC almost as fast as it happens: it's a mission. O'Neill's intel is two weeks out of date, but Harry's happy to tell him that SG-9 couldn't pry loose the widget _du jour_ from the gentle people of dear old PX3-595. (It also tells him that they've got a copy of Carter's dialing software: this place uses a DHD to dial the Gate, so they have to have some way of converting dialing algorithms to glyphs.)

Newman's happy as a kid at Christmas. Harry tells O'Neil to "do what you have to do". Funny how the brass is always happy with the idea of wiping out whole villages so long as they don't have to use the word "kill".

#

It takes maybe two hours to get the team together, and to get O'Neill geared up and armed (couldn't take a weapon through the Gate when he left the SGC, didn't even try). Newman, Tobias, Slater, and him: two boys, two girls. Their destination is a cave about fifty yards from the Gate.

The others all have streetsweepers in addition to sidearms. All he has is a pistol, but hey, at least its got a full clip. It's night when they arrive, and they don't run into any Tirnoks on the way. The payload is right there in plain sight (Newman decides to play kid's games with it; he's lucky O'Neill doesn't shoot him on the spot, much as he'd like to). The device isn't Tirnokian, it's Asgard tech, some kind of super-duper invisibility device about the size of a bar of Fels-Naptha. And that's when Tobias decides to mention to the new kid on the block (that would be him) that this is an Asgard Protected World.

Crap.

He's on edge after that until the moment they Gate back to their secret clubhouse. He wants to grab Tobias and shake her until her teeth rattle: sure, go on an interstellar looting spree, alienate their allies, give Earth a bad rep--but when you start stealing stuff from Asgard worlds, you're pulling the big dog's tail. He catches himself thinking about ways to do this better, faster, smarter, and pulls up short. Whose side is he on, anyway? It's hard to remember now. He'd thought, going in, that he'd despise whatever mercenary thugs Mayborne had managed to enlist, but instead it's like looking through a funhouse mirror at the man he used to be. (That man had standards, as he recalls; well, Newman has standards too.) Maybe they _are_ brass-knuckle idealists. Maybe, instead of shutting them down, he ought to be _improving_ them: hands off the Asgard stuff--too dangerous--and Tobias is already retro-engineering a lot of what they bring back, so where's the harm in putting that stuff back where they found it once she's done?

He misses his team. Carter, all idealism and trust, certain he'd never give her an unlawful order. Daniel, their conscience, insisting they care about the civilizations they meet as much as (more than) they care about their own.

Teal'c, who gave up everything he had for nothing more than a promise.

No, he can't break faith with them. Even if they never know the truth.

#

When they get back to the Rebel Base, there's a party atmosphere O'Neill has no trouble decoding. They have two teams, a handful of support personnel, and no backup. Any time a team comes back in one piece, it's party time. (It doesn't matter that back at the SGC backup and rescue were often just a comforting lie; at least they had that much.) When Newman starts crowing about their latest trophy, and how _useful_ it could be to them on Earth, he thinks of what Chancellor Travell said at the beginning of this: _"Forgive me, Colonel, but our research shows that you are far more likely to use our technology against enemies on your own planet."_ The kids are talking a great game about defending the fatherland, but it's just smoke and mirrors. He manages to draw Newman out a little more: Tobias may be retro-engineering the big stuff, but the stuff small enough to hide goes back to Earth by mole.

So there _is_ a mole on one of the Teams. Good to know.

So when Harry phones in to see if they've brought home the bacon and to tell them when and where to hand it off, it's easy enough to arrange to be the courier. Newman swallows his line of bushwa more easily than any of his COs ever did: there's a point to having spent two weeks building himself up as a plausible quisling, and this is it. The payoff. The whole enchilada. He's one of them now. (Yes and no.) Once he's made the drop, maybe he can find out who the mole is. With that, and the address for this place, he and General Hammond can tie this whole operation up in a pretty pink bow and make it go away.

If nothing goes wrong.

If he lives.

Tobias goes to the DHD and dials.

He steps into the wormhole.

#

**Author's Note:**

> AUTHOR'S NOTE:
> 
> Only Tobias and Newman get named in S3e18 "Shades of Grey". At least two of the others _have_ names--Sean Grieves; Lt. Kershaw--but you don't find that out until S5e20 "The Sentinel", and the other characters aren't even listed in IMdB's entry for the show (probably because they don't have lines?) so I grabbed some other names at random from the crew who worked on the episode (and then spent a couple of hours on Wikipedia researching NCO ranks, because Newman introduces Tobias first, which implies that the other five are of lower rank than Lieutenant).
> 
> I spent a lot of time staring at backgrounds starting around 29:08. That gave me the sex ratio in the two "away teams", and it also shows that there are a lot more than seven people there (eight if you count Jack). You see them going back and forth in the background as Jack, Tobias, Newman, and another unnamed spearcarrier prepare to go to loot the Asgard Protected Planet. What happens to them when the Asgard show up, and whether or not there are other black operation sites out there, is something canon never resolves, but possibly some of the people captured knew about other sites and gave up that information in exchange for clemency.
> 
> I was unable to identify the type of automatic weapon the black teams are carrying when they go through the Gate. Woe.
> 
> #


End file.
